B-Movie Czar Uwe Boll Speaks Out on Anti-Gaming Flick Campaign

The director that the Web loves to hate offers an illuminating first interview after a nearly $1 million sponsorship to shut down his video-game adaptations, comparing the (growing) anti-Boll petition to the Obama campaign, talking trash (literally) to his geek criticsÂ—and, believe it or not, showing off the lighter (albeit still curse-laden) side of the man who may be the world's worst filmmaker.

A little background, for the uninitiated few left out of the rebellion sweeping the Web over the past month: Uwe Boll (pronounced you-vuh ball) is the reason that films based on video games get such a bad wrap. The 43-year-old German B-movie writer and director is the (somewhat addled) mind behind big-screen adaptations of Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, BloodRayne and Postal, due out May 23. Next to such box-office stinkers, Resident Evil seems like Citizen Kane--hell, even Street Fighter holds up against Enter the Dragon.

On April 7, the very outspoken Boll made a very public challenge to his critics in the blogosphere and beyond: Hand him a petition signed by 1 million people, and he'll stop making movies--period. Sensing marketing gold, Stride Gum announced last week that it would offer a free pack of gum (estimated value: 80 Cents) to each of the million haters if the anti-Boll list hits its mark (as of this writing, the "Stop Dr. Uwe Boll" petition was surging past 275,000 signatures, while "Long Live Uwe Boll" was just over 5,000).

Bribery, Boll calls it. The fix is in. And this is why he's mad as hell.

"Look, this is absurd," Boll told me last week in his first extensive interview since the gum-in. "It would be like Obama says, `I pay 10 bucks for everybody who votes for me.'"

The angrier Boll got in our half-hour chat, the more his thick accent degenerated into that caricature of the pissed-off, pumped-up German--part Rainier Wolfcastle from The Simpsons, part Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live circa 1988, part Conan O'Brien's impersonation of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And nothing makes Boll angrier than those hundreds of thousands of critics. Sure, nearly all of his 20-odd movies may be nearly unwatchable (those same critics point to IMDB's "Bottom 100" list, where Boll sports three of the user-generated worst films of all time). But this is a man who simply wants to entertain--"sex and gore and big stars" are all he's really been after since 1991's German Fried Movie.

So how does Uwe Boll get his groove back? For starters, Stride has got it all wrong: No number of e-signatures is going to cut off Boll's passion for original fllms--just put the nail in the coffin on gaming adaptations. For his part, Boll is holding out for his own sponsor: "Look," he says, "I wait [for the moment] that Budweiser gives free six-packs out for the people that sign the pro-Boll petitions."

To be sure, there are plenty of sub-par filmmakers out there, from Hamburg to Hollywood (everyone pumped for Rob Cohen's upcoming summer opus, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor?). But perhaps no living director makes for a more appealing target to bloggers and their commenters (save Michael Bay). Uwe Boll is the spastic kid in your classroom: Attack him, and he'll push back--with often-hilarious results. He'll curse. He'll scream. He'll try to fight you. Boll may turn gaming classics into popcorn smut, but he certainly doesn't back down.

And if you're a self-made critic seeking worldwide fame, there's no surer way to earn yourself a footnote on Wikipedia than to go after him. Case in point: In 2006, Boll challenged his harshest judges--plus fellow auteurs Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery--to a boxing match. Four of them accepted and, in an event dubbed "Raging Boll", all four of them were knocked out. Did hand-to-hand victory overcome film-to-film snobbery? "These critics? Yes," he tells me. "Not all the critics. And I always said, to be honest, I'm absolutely not against a bad review of a movie."

It was around the Raging Boll smackdown that Boll underwent something of a transformation. For years, his work flew under the radar, existing largely as a haven for investors taking advantage of loopholes in the German tax code--cash out on the hits, recoup losses on the flops. But in 2005, widespread abuse of the system forced the government to shut it down, and Boll's days of risk-free filmmaking came to a close. That's when he went beyond turning video games into an asset ("It was an opportunity to do different genres and to have marketing and a built-in audience")--and honed his rage-aholic persona.

"He used to get really mad when people would make fun of him," says Devin Faraci, editor of geek movie site Chud.com. "He seems to have figured out that this is good for him, because it gets his name out there and it makes his movies something you have to see because they're so bad."

Sure, Boll still meets any mention of his legions of detractors with seething rage: "You get trashed in the garbage can from some geek who have no clue what they're talking about." But amidst the targeted attacks and four-letter words are moments of laughter and some genuine--if aloof--sadness: "In [BloodRayne], for example, is Geraldine Chaplin and Billy Zane and Meat Loaf and Michael Madsen and Ben Kingsley--maybe one of the best casts. ... They were writing a page only about me, and this is dangerous."

At one point, Boll asked me to hold on while he asked for directions. On the other end of the phone, I heard an unfailingly polite man graciously ask a woman for proper directions to his destination. Back on with me? Right back into that now well-honed public persona, one cartoonish soundbite after another. As Faraci says, Boll may be a "wildly incompetent filmmaker," but he's one who has found a way to play his own game--not just screw up your favorite one.

Alas, I play along, asking for his official response to Stride's sponsorship and the anti-fans it represents--the masses trying to force this unfortunate auteur into premature retirement. "Go back to mommy's coffee table and eat your sandwich and grow up and try to have your own life," Boll says, "or try and make it better."

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